SEO Checklist for Food Bloggers
Hello food bloggers! Thanks for stopping by, below is a very handy SEO checklist that you should reference before publishing your recipe articles.
Feel free to bookmark this page, we have also created a PDF version you can download here if you want to print it out. You can also view the full-size infographic image.
Big thanks to Casey Markee from Media Wyse for contributing most of this information =)
It can be a great source of frustration when trying to make a name for yourself as a food blogger and your site doesn’t rank. You know that your writing style resonates with your readership. You know that there are legions of potential readers around the world who would enjoy your content.
Yet, despite consistently delivering excellent content and getting all the right kinds of comments from your listenership… your audience still isn’t growing the way that you’d like.
You know that your content isn’t the issue, and it certainly isn’t that delicious food recipe. It’s your ability to get your food blog in front of the right sets of eyes. The kind that will engage meaningfully with your content and share it on social platforms in order to increase its virality. The kind that’ll scroll deeply, spend longer on the page, travel to multiple pages on your blog, sign up for your email newsletter, and behave in ways that curry favor with search engines.
And this means making yourself a master of SEO, and not just delicious food. Let’s look at some potentially transformative SEO tips for food bloggers.
Know What Google Likes
Of course, Google isn’t the only search engine out there, but as the biggest and most widely used, it’s a digital deity that you’ll need to appease them with your post. So do some research into what causes its crawlers to list one blogger’s content over another’s in SERPS.
Some of these “must have” for Google-optimized sites include:
- Websites that are secure (URLS that have a SSL certificate and a https:// prefix)
- Food blogs that use structured data for recipes (more on that later)
- Posts that encourage good scroll depth and time on page
- Websites that are regularly updated with good quality content
Do Your Keyword Research
Keywords are essential in helping users to find the exact recipes you’re posting, as well as the dietary qualifiers such as vegan, keto, paleo, vegetarian etc. Adding keywords like dietary specifications will help your posts draw the right kind of traffic from people looking for those specific types of recipes.
Use tools like SEMrush to help you choose the right types of keywords and to maintain good keyword density throughout each recipe post. Just make sure that your keywords fit in organically and there’s no keyword stuffing. This isn’t Thanksgiving 😉